Aren’t most hinges non-empirical? Other people have minds; the world exited before I was born.
That’s very interesting, because as a statement it’s open to interpretation. What does it mean to “have parents”? There are functional, cultural, and experiential definitions. Is a sperm doner a parent? Not by some definitions.
Would it be accurate to say that some hinge statements might have seemed more like unproblematic presuppositions in the past than they do now? For example (without wanting to start a shit-fight here) the idea that “a woman is a human being born of the female sex” might once have been treated as straightforward, whereas today it is widely contested.
Yes indeed! So some examples are not constitutive of the game, but function as a riverbed that can move over time or a scaffold that holds other stuff in place.
So are these hinges? Or are they certain but not constitutive and not a hinge? Are they implications of hinges…?
That’s the sort of thing I have in mind in the OP.
I haven’t looked at On Certainty for a while, but my initial response is that hinge certainties are things that we might take for granted that are not listed in the rules of chess, e.g. that the pieces do not randomly appear or disappear, that the pieces do not move on their own; those everyday human things we tacitly assume. They might also include the rules of the game (again, I haven’t looked at it in a while), but I consider hinges more foundational than the explicitly stated rules. I also don’t wish to exclude things we have been taught (“swallowed whole”?) and taken for granted, but maybe there is a distinction to be made between these explicit or grammatical and more foundational or tacit certainties.
This taking for granted is a large, if not the largest, aspect of being a hinge certainty, at least on my immediate reflection and memory of the text. However, this view may be coloured by one of the memorable passages in PI, which may be taken out of context or misremembered, but which I remember as: that we do not ordinarily assume when we open a door that it opens to a yawning abyss instead of a normal hallway or the outside world. It is stated at PI 84 and is more about the doubts that we can dream up in philosophy that we wouldn’t ordinarily consider in practice. Maybe it has some bearing here. Wittgenstein also touches on whether it makes sense to doubt some things or everything.
This is more evidence that Wittgenstein is actually leading us toward the conclusion that there is no such thing as “hinges”, as commonly understood by this term.
Hinges are an illusion, produced by the way that “common sense” takes advantage of the fallible and gullible intuitions, seizing us in the self-deception of certainty. Good disciplined philosophy is what is required, as therapy, to alleviate this condition. That is what Socrates devoted his time to, dispelling the self-deceptive illusions of “common sense”.
Without the therapy of philosophy, the idle talk about hinges goes on and on, misguided by those illusions of “common sense”.
The remarks from the Blue Book do not disparage common sense when it says: “as soon as we revert to the standpoint of common sense this general uncertainty disappears.” Wittgenstein works against the grounds of the solipsist who entertains such uncertainty.
Wittgenstein has also said in many places that he does not object to the activities of science and math but distinguishes his inquiry from them.
Wittgenstein and Moore agree that common sense trumps solipsism. Wittgenstein sees Moore’s personal certainty as not a good enough recognition of the “inherited” world. Enter the metaphor of hinges:
That is, the questions we pose and our doubts rest on certain propositions’ being exempt from doubt, being as it were the hinges on which those questions and doubts move.
According to your reading, Wittgenstein is reifying this set of propositions for the sake of demonstrating their absurdity. I think that is precisely incorrect.
I am posting this her because I am still trying to figure out how the new forum works. I would like to here your response to something I posted earlier. We agreed that hinges have their place in our epistemic practices:
If Wittgenstein had wanted to equate science with the whole system, no doubt he would have said that science forms an enormous system. But he doesn’t.
I have the impression that this question has received a fairly thorough going over already. I certainly don’t have anything to add to what has been said.
The concept of common sense is a bit of a wild card here, isn’t it? What exactly does it comprise?
Ryle has a useful distinction here (in “Dilemmas”) between technical and untechnical concepts. By this he means the concepts that everyone must use in order to say, or think, anything. In the context of that book, he applies the idea to “scientists”, but it seems to me that it applies equally well to musicians, mathematicians, and chess players.
In other words, I think, it means the inherited background that we all pick up as small children and which forms the starting-point of everything that we say and think.
The interesting point here is that this is a very different kind of foundation for knowledge from the “traditional” (in analytic philosophy) foundation. That’s logic, of course, which from this point of view becomes just another specialization alongside all the others.
Presumably, it gives us a clue about what Wittgenstein meant when he said he was hoping to provoke a change in our culture.
I wanted to stress that common sense is a remedy for the general uncertainty of the solipsist discussed in the Blue Book but not a replacement for seeing in terms of language games. Consider an objection to a turn of phrase early in On Certainty:
Practice in the use of a rule also shows what a mistake in its employment is.
When someone has made sure, then he will go on to say, “Yes, the calculation is correct”, but he doesn’t draw this conclusion from the state of being certain. One does not infer matters of fact from one’s own certainty.
Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which someone states facts, but one does not conclude from the tone of voice that he is justified.
Those sentences to which, as if bewitched, we revert again and again, I should like to weed out from philosophical language.
It’s not a matter of Moore’s knowing that there is a hand there, but rather that we wouldn’t understand him if he said, “I may, of course, be making a mistake here”. We’d ask, “So what would such a mistake look like?” – For example, what would the discovery that it was a mistake look like?
Darn it, the thing posted before I was done. I will continue in another post.
Note how the as it were of 30 is the same expression used in 341 concerning hinges. From this expression it cannot be said that certainty has been defined.
I am familiar with that example. It’s brilliant. Pity it didn’t come to mind at the time.
It is better than mine, because it brings out the fact that it is not a matter of intention, but of interpretation in a context. My problem with the “held fast” metaphor is that it does suggest that this is a matter of subjective certainty.
It may be a bit more complicated than that. “Hinge” suggests a framework that doesn’t move. But “axis”, which you mentioned earlier (in your list, if I remember), doesn’t; it suggests things like spinning tops or planets, where there is no larger framework. “Pivot”, by the way, suggests to me something different again, a lever, where the pivot doesn’t any fixed location at all.
[quote=“Banno, post:79, topic:113”]
We might ask if the hinges are the very same as the constitutive rules, such that any hinge may be expressed as a “…counts as…” expression. And if not, what other sorts of expressions are also hinges? Further, are there certainties that are not hinges?
The last question is a very good one. I have to say “constitutive” suggests to me the setting up of a framework, which doesn’t move but defines the space in which other things move. The example suggests to me that not all hinges are rules, but are, perhaps, consequents of rules - Synthetic a priori, perhaps.
I agree that there is a strong temptation to fit all the metaphors together (and, I would add, to push them further than they really need to go. It’s all about interpretation - and about what helps the issue at stake in the specific metaphor.
I would say that a hinge (defined as a role for propositions, rather than a classification of them) is what stays put, while the debate turns around it. A presupposition (again, defined as a role rather than a classification is something that sets the framework of debate - the space within which it takes place. But nothing is definite here. But consider, alongside presuppositions, axioms, assumptions. Presuppositions are regarded as true, axioms were traditionally regarded as true and self-evident. Assumptions are usually taken to be true but without the usual argumentative support. Suppositions or hypotheses are posited as true, but without any real commitment .
There’s no reason that I know of why these statements might not change - be modified or abandoned or adopted - over history. On this view, it’s all part of our cultural history.
This feels like seriously unmapped territory. But there must be someone who has tackled it before.
That’s absolutely right. Certainty is drawing the conclusion. The temptation to posit it as a piece of evidence reminds me of the temptation to posit the seeing of something as the evidence that we see it.
That’s a brillian metaphor.
The system doesn’t seem able to recognize that these are actually quotations from On certainty
That’s quite right. W is, I think, not a fan of definitions. I guess the reason is that giving definitions is itself a language game and that we learn and use language mostly without any reference to definitions.
The remarks contrast common sense with philosophy. For a philosopher, like Wittgenstein, who understands the value of philosophy, the disappearance of the general uncertainty which is produced by philosophy is not a good thing.
So the issue is, are we looking at what Wittgenstein says as philosophers, or are we looking as people who would hold the inclinations of common sense as more valuable than the discipline of philosophy.
The matter is not a question of whether common sense trumps solipsism, it’s whether common sense trumps philosophy. And as much as Wittgenstein pits these two against each other, in a way similar to Socrates, I would not conclude that he argues for common sense over philosophy. No one would conclude that Socrates argues for common sense over philosophy. But, we have Plato to offer us guidance.
I can’t say that I understand what you mean by “reifying this set of propositions” in this context. I don’t think that is what I am doing. However, look at the context of your quote. Just prior to this, he argues extensively that the person who doubts would behave no differently than the person who does not
339. Imagine someone who is supposed to fetch a friend from the railway station and doesn’t simply look the train up in the time-table and go to the station at the right time, but says:“I have no belief that the train will really arrive, but I will go to the station all the same.” He does everything that the normal person does, but accompanies it with doubts or with self-annoyance, etc
Then, your quoted passage is inserted, as something which seems contrary to what is being discussed in the context. And after that proposal of hinges which act as certainty, he explicitly says “…it isn’t that the situation is like this: …”. Notice the colon after this line, indicating two distinct thoughts, rather than a semicolon. Then this is followed up with “344. My life consists in my being content to accept many things.”
It appears clear to me, that he is dismissing the idea that there are hinges of certainty, replacing it with “I must be content to accept many things”. I wouldn’t say that he is showing the idea of hinges of certainty to be an “absurdity”, only that they are a faulty representation produced by the effects of common sense on intuition, without philosophical guidance.
OC is a collection of notes. We need to look elsewhere to get a better picture of the whole system:
Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated structure. And even clarity is only a means to this end and not an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, transparency, is an end in itself I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me. So I am aiming at something different than are the scientists and my thoughts move differently than do theirs. (Culture and Value)
Our scientific investigation are not limited to the work of scientists. It extends to the way we understand and see the world, how we judge.
OC298. ‘We are quite sure of it’ does not mean just that every single person is certain of it, but that we
belong to a community which is bound together by science and education.
Why does he single out scientific investigations at OC 342? The question is not intended as an argument or evidence.
See 152. > I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them
subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that
anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.
Our knowledge forms an enormous system of intermeshing language games, and only within this system has a particular bit the value we give it.
A potted history: in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued for a compete account of how things are, being those statements in logical space that are the facts. Over time he moved away from this crystalline certainty, admitting the vast variety of things we do with words into his considerations. Listing the facts is one activity amongst very many. He abandons the idea that clarity requires a single theoretical structure underlying all discourse. He moved away from a single account of how language works to instead looking at how language is used and mapping out the interrelation between the things we do with words.
That fits the text quite well: “When I am trying to mate someone in chess, I cannot have doubts about the pieces perhaps changing places of themselves and my memory simultaneously playing tricks on me so that I don’t notice.”
Leaving aside the exegesis of what exactly a hinge might be, do we have at least two certainties: those constitutive rules that set up our games, “This counts as a bishop”, and those that permit even the constitutive rules to be set out, such as that the pieces do not cease to exist mid game?
To what extent are these latter certainties assumptions? I doubt that many folk hope to win a game because their opponent’s Queen simply vanished; but that the pieces remain consistent for the duration of the game is not one of the rules of chess… is it?